Hey Everyone! I hope you're enjoying this summer weather! Columbus is a tad gloomy today, but it's been warm and I've been loving it! In the spirit of classes coming to an end and the transition to summer break, we decided to talk about our favorite classes we took in undergrad. As you can imagine, as a chemistry major, I've taken a lot of different chemistry classes, both theory and labs so here a some of my favorites.
Inorganic Chemistry Lab
I know I'm an analytical chemistry by trade (and future degree) but if I wasn't, I'd be doing inorganic chemistry. I absolutely loved this lab in undergrad. Inorganic chemistry is the study of metals and metal complexes (longggggg story short) so lab consisted of a lot of synthesis. The difference here is that all of the complexes turned colors (which I thought was so cool)! I also loved this class because it gave me an opportunity to go through the full process of synthesizing something. We had to make the complex, purify if, characterize it, and then write about what we found. Plus my professor was amazing, which helped a lot.
Instrumental Analysis Lab
Okay, I'm a lab rat so naturally a lot of the labs I took were great. For instrumental lab, we got to learn how a lot of common lab techniques for the first half of the semester before developing and executing our own research project. Being able to come up with my own thing and running experiments for it in this class was one of my first tastes of doing research (I also was in a research group at the time). If I remember correctly, my group looked at the formaldehyde content of toy textiles using Ultraviolet- Visible spectroscopy. Suffice it to say, I learned a lot and had fun doing it.
Intro to Feminism
So the last class that I loved taking at Pitt wasn't a chemistry class. Besides my B.S. in chemistry, I have minors in sociology and Africana Studies. With these minors, I took a lot of classes about race and gender, one of which was my Intro to Feminism class. I identify as a feminist and getting to learn about the history and different forms of feminism and womanism was interesting! I always tell people that it's good to have interests outside of STEM and this is one of mine. This class was writing and discussion based, so getting to read and explore ideas from different time periods and getting to dialogue with my classmates was a great experience.
What were some of your favorite classes? Tweet me some responses!
See you next week!
- The Chemist
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